Apple To Face Lawsuit For iMessage Glitch

An anonymous reader writes "We've all heard about iPhone users switching over to Android-powered phones and no longer being able to receive text messages from friends and family still using iPhones. Well, a woman with exactly this issue has filed a lawsuit against Apple, complaining that '[p]eople who replace their Apple devices with non-Apple wireless phones and tablets are "penalized and unable to obtain the full benefits of their wireless-service contracts."' To be specific, '[t]he suit is based on contractual interference and unfair competition laws.' She is seeking class action status and undetermined damages."

Comments

Anti-competitive

[Animats]

This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.

Re:Anti-competitive

[kanweg]

Well, sending iMessages is a free alternative to SMS messages. This helped to drive prices of texting down after many years of excessive pricing for that. She enjoyed both of these benefits. Thanks.

Bert

Re:Anti-competitive

[darkain]

Internet Explorer was made free, it helped drive down the cost of web browser software, of which everyone benefited. Microsoft got slammed with an anti-trust suit for it.

Re:Anti-competitive

[mhol6140]

The Messages sent on iMessage give a delivered signal when they reach the target phone. Anyone not noticing a delivered message should try calling her.

Re: Anti-competitive

[therealkevinkretz]

Uh, its browser competition was already free - how far down could it push their price?

Re:Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there still developed world telcos that bother to meter texts ?

16€/month, unlimited voice/text + 3Gb fair use

Re: Anti-competitive

[theCzechGuy]

Can you name a single browser whose price went down as a result of IE being free? Not to mention it isn't free, it comes bundled with an expensive OS. Furthermore, by your logic it must have been Netscape that drove the cost of IE down, not the other way around.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that it makes it look like the imessage was delivered even though it wasn't.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.
And yet for 30 years they have given microsoft a pass.

Re:Anti-competitive

[_Shad0w_]

It's usually an option in the UK, not across the board on all contracts. Mine gives me 100 minutes and 500 text for £22.50 and I have 1GB of data on top of that which costs another £10. I can almost certainly get it cheaper, but it would take effort and mean switching provider. I probably should do it at some point.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Your.Master]

Netscape Navigator cost $49. Look at this article from 1996: http://www.fastcompany.com/277.... Back when Netscape had as dominant a marketshare as IE later had. Note how the author seemed to just assume that a browser than didn't cost any money couldn't be any good.

Nowadays, Netscape Navigator has been forked a couple times and the surviving branch is called Firefox, and at $0 its price went down significantly.

The original IE did not come bundled with the OS, it was a free add-on. There was a version for Windows and a version for Mac at this point.

Fast forward to 1998: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001.... January 1998, you will note. Windows 98, which was the first Windows that bundled IE in it, wouldn't be released until May 1998. So it would be difficult to argue that bundling had anything to do with it.

Later, Opera would follow suit, going from a price of $39 to also offering an ad-supported version in 2000: http://archive.today/201205291.... It only went ad-free 5 years later. At this time, people were getting sick of IE6, since it once was a decent browser (seriously!) but it had been stagnant far too long. However Firefox was starting to rise and it was taking all the people Opera could have gotten.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Incoming calls/texts are free in UK, provided you're not roaming when charges may kick in

Re:Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

You are paying far more than you need to, how hard is it to pick up the phone and tell that to your phone company? You can probably get the same for half the price, for a one off conversation.

Re:Anti-competitive

[p.g.king]

This helped to drive prices of texting down...

Any evidence to show any causal link? Or just plucked out the air?

Since if you had to use texts you'd still be paying and if you could use iMessage you'd always not be paying. So reducing price would still leave those using iMessage not paying you, and those still needing to use text just paying you less. I can see nothing to suggest iMessage would have had any impact on the price.

Re:Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

Apple doesn't make it hard. She just didn't follow instructions prior to selling her device and she hasn't followed instructions after selling her device to fix it. The hard part is pure fiction.

Re:Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

Microsoft got slammed not for making it free but for claiming it was so integrated into the operating system that it could not be removed.

Re: Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

No it wasn't. Netscape Communicator was a commercial package that cost. The charged for both the browser and the server.

Re: Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

Most of your comment is right.

The original IE did not come bundled with the OS, it was a free add-on. There was a version for Windows and a version for Mac at this point.

IE 1 wasn't free it was bundled with Microsoft Plus! which was a bunch of pay add-ons.
IE 2 came with OSes for free. At the time people saw it as a much worse starter browser used for people who rarely if ever used the web. Remember the internet was more diverse back then, it was quite easy to want to be on the internet but not on the web or to have web access via. an ISP but mainly use the ISP's other services.

Re: Anti-competitive

[rvw]

No it wasn't. Netscape Communicator was a commercial package that cost. The charged for both the browser and the server.

I don't recall ever paying for Netscape.

Re: Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

What year did you get on the web? Maybe your employer was paying for it and you didn't realize. I'm not sure what to tell you.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Bob_Who]

This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.

Welcome to American Hustle.. Like most sore winners we strut and take too much for granted - particularly our own citizens. Too bad we lost sight of our core values in the process of our financial dominance and success. American values flourish on a level playing field, in an inclusive meritocracy, but now we're back to royal assholes playing king of the hill. Perhaps dominance is more Sisyphus' crushing refrain. Human nature rears its ugly head in any golden age. Lets start with the obvious : Let's stop tolerating unfair, greedy, scum-baggy, slimy business behavior like its an acceptable cost of playing free market capitalism. Its bullshit, we don't tolerate it from people, why do we let big business off the hook? Corporations don't compete, they dominate and destroy innovation, once they reap its rewards. Screw 'em. Just because your pension can't keep up with inflation, that's no excuse to rationalize accepting their dividends. The Golden Rule is more important than the Gold when you have no prospects for success in a neo-facsist cluster fuck of failure and denial. A free market offers options, choices, and healthy competition. . .

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

ISP paid for it and distributed Netscape.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Splab]

Arh 'murcian, cause what we do is what everyone else are doing.

Text prices outside the US was definitely not driven anywhere by Apple, they have been plummeting for ages - having multiple carriers did that, not some shiney toy.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't recall ever paying for Netscape.

Here from a news report of them dropping prices:

Now that Netscape Communications (NSCP) no longer charges for its flagship browser, it has decided to cut prices on its retail products and compensate retailers for any losses incurred.

That was in 1998.

Re:Anti-competitive

[craigminah]

At what point does something convenient and free like iMessages become a mandatory expectation across all devices known to man? Why not say Microsoft MUST make it's Office suite run on my PS4 or on my iPad...sue sue sue until they do it because it's their fault. [/sarcasm] Seriously, everyone needs to stop suing for everything.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Kaenneth]

And it WAS tightly integrated, Windows back then was a mess that made cooked spaghetti look tiny.

A Specific Example:

The Help system required Internet Explorer, to render documentation.
Internet Explorer required the TCP/IP stack, to go to non-local pages.
TCP/IP required the Help system, to explain what a DNS server, Default Gateway, etc. was.

Windows, pre-Vista was riddled with circular dependencies like that, where every piece depended on others in a loop.

Microsoft has been redesigning Windows since then in Layers, and no (new) module is allowed to have a dependency in a higher or equal layer.

So NOW, yes, they can flip IE on and off like a switch; but back then, it was an insane design change to make under the given time pressure.

And do you know how many Copies of XP 'n' (the one without IE) were sold?

Less than 2,000. Mostly by mistake, by people who didn't know what they were buying.

Noone actually wanted it, they just wanted to screw the big American corporation.

Re:Anti-competitive

[ArmoredDragon]

What the hell are you talking about? Text message prices became cheap (or should I say unlimited at no extra charge) on the mainstream carriers a long time before imessage came out.

Text initially was practically free until it became popular and fashionable for carriers to charge money for it because people were using less of their voice minutes as a result (they did this by enticing the less affluent and younger customers into cheap plans with very few voice minutes that had high per text rates, much in the same as how less affluent customers go for phone subsidies thinking they're getting a good deal.) After voice calls reached a point where you could get a crapload of minutes for basically nothing, it followed that text prices went down again, and iphone hadn't even been out yet. Nowadays its hard to find a carrier that doesn't give you both unlimited.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Kaenneth]

Oops, small mistake (4 am here...) XP 'n' was the one without Windows Media Player, not without Internet Explorer.

Re: Anti-competitive

[xaxa]

I pay £6/month for roughly that deal (250m, unlimited texts, 500MB.)

Phone up pretending to switch and they'll half your price.

Re:Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

It probably would have satisfied the court if they had internet explorer disabled so that it couldn't browse arbitrary websites, Netscape was installed and Netscape configured as the default browser. All of which was easy for the end user to do. The deep technical issues are true but mostly irrelevant to the monopoly loss.

Re:Anti-competitive

[An dochasac]

This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.

Not really. "Into trouble" usually means a write-off fine and a sullied name for the length of Joe sixpack's attention span (a few weeks or months depending on whether the news oligopolies relationship with their corporate Goliath sponsors.)

Also, you forgot some, Employers that make it difficult for employees to switch careers and health-care companies who leverage pre-existing conditions to prevent customers from seeking competing alternatives. Political parties who shoehorn 300 million people into two points of view. The fact that Americans have come to accept monopolies in most aspects of their lives means they can't even see them or the problems they cause anymore. Apple isn't seen as a monopoly or even as an anti-competive corporate Goliath. Apple is seen as a "personal choice" or religion.

Re: Anti-competitive

[_Shad0w_]

I'll actually just switch if I do get round to doing it. I'm not interesting in playing their games. If they have a better tariff they should have moved me to it in the first place.

Re:Anti-competitive

[_Shad0w_]

Extremely hard, actually; it gives me an anxiety attack (things my mobile phone is never used for: making phone calls). My phone at work is on DND on the time for a reason.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Paradise Pete]

This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble

You think it was intentional? That'd be pretty dumb. Really dumb. Messages is far from perfect, and this is surely just one more problem.

Just this morning I used Messages on the Mac to send a simple text (to an iPhone user). A few minutes later I hear my phone receive a message, but not the computer. I ignored it at first, but then I looked at the phone. It was a reply to my earlier text. I continued the chat using the computer, sending several messages. About ten minutes later her original reply *finally* appeared on the computer. Now out of order, of course.

This was a bit unusual, but it happens often enough to demonstrate that Apple has a lot of work to do on Messages.

I also use Line on both the phone and the computer, and that *never* happens. And Line has about 400M accounts, so it's not like Apple has the excuse of too much volume.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Paradise Pete]

The Messages sent on iMessage give a delivered signal when they reach the target phone.

That's the way it's supposed to work, yes. But if for example you send a message from your phone, then go another device and look at the thread, there's a non-zero chance that your original phone will now mark it as delivered, even though the actual recipient hasn't received it.

Re:Anti-competitive

[DarwinSurvivor]

Nowadays its hard to find a carrier that doesn't give you both unlimited.

I agree with the rest of what you said, but Canada would like to debate you on that last one.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure I get text messages from iPhone users on my Android phone. A large part of my user base are Mac users. Oh, you mean iChat? It's not even fully compatible with its Mavericks successor. Maybe should try that other feature of phones -- voice.

Re: Anti-competitive

[sjwt]

No it wasn't. Netscape Communicator was a commercial package that cost. The charged for both the browser and the server.

I don't recall ever paying for Netscape.

Well then, thank Microsoft for its anti competitive behaviour then!

Re: Anti-competitive

[ganjadude]

up until IE was free, netscape and others charged for their browsers

Re:Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.

Well, the phone carriers are the only ones that I know have been smacked in your examples. There are several registrars that still make it difficult to move your domain, and there are banks like BoA that make it nearly impossible to close an account with them without threatening legal action.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

And thanks for changing that!

Re: Anti-competitive

[sjames]

The browser was always available as a free download. They made some money from larger ISPs that wanted to distribute a custom version and on the server.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

People who actually paid for Netscape are lower on the totem pole than those who paid for mIRC.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not that it was deliberately hard to switch though. The user just needed to disassociate their number from iMessage, which they failed to do.

Can you think of a scenario where Apple will be automatically notified by the user when they purchase an Android phone?

Re: Anti-competitive

[Hamsterdan]

I started working for an ISP in mid '90s. At that time, we distributed Netscape (at a cost). When IE became available, we switched. to it. When it became bundled with Windows, our Intenet access kit went from 6 (3.x and 95 versions) floppies to 1, saving even more money. Bundling IE is what killed Netscape (in part).

Re:Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows back then was a mess that made cooked spaghetti look tiny.

You make it sound like this isn't an issue now. Just recently someone tracked down why running a hundred instances of visual studios compiler with a low thread priority would sometimes hang everything else. The compiler includes Microsofts XML library which still depends on the internet explorer lib and that in turn generates a window message queue for rendering and locks on some global resource. This results in every other application freezing until it releases it again and having a low priority thread hold an important lock is a special kind of ugly since the lock cannot get released until the thread gets to run again - which it wont until all higher priority threads got their turn.

So NOW, yes, they can flip IE on and off like a switch; but back then, it was an insane design change to make under the given time pressure.

For most people removing the blue IE icon from the desktop and program menu would have been enough to have IE "unbundled". A step further they could have removed the ie.exe leaving the rendering dll used by the help and other programs, of course that would have required that they "fix" windows update and other services that ran as ActiveX components inside IE to use either a special purpose exe that only loaded the renderer with the windows update page or use whatever user installed browser if that could load ActiveX.

Microsoft could have provided a working solution on day one and refined it to the next windows release, instead they claimed difficulties and later sabotaged the EU mandated browser selection (random ordering which would default to IE 70% of the time, even after half the included browsers where just skins for IE) and some time later just "forgot" to include it again.

Re: Anti-competitive

[therealkevinkretz]

Maybe they just charged for commercial use? Or maybe I'm confusing it with Mosaic? Either way, I'm certain that at a job I had before 1998, Netscape could be freely and legitimately obtained for use on Solaris.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Tony Isaac]

This assumes that Apple engineers are smart enough to do this intentionally. I suspect the problem is more due to incompetence than evil intent.

Domain registrars are another story. If you've tried lately to renew a domain name registration even with Network Solutions, the original registrar, you'll find it really, really difficult to just renew, without buying some additional service you didn't want. And once you do, good luck trying to get your money back!

Re: Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

Are you sure? I thought IE 1 was part of Microsoft Plus which was a paid package (though cheap) part of the "Internet Jumpstart Kit".

Re: Anti-competitive

[sjames]

IE != Netscape.

Re: Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

I understand that I'm talking about IE. Netscape 1 was unquestionable sold stand alone.

Re: Anti-competitive

[sjames]

You said:

No it wasn't. Netscape Communicator was a commercial package that cost. The charged for both the browser and the server.

How silly of me to not realize you meant Microsoft Netscape IE 1.

Re: Anti-competitive

[BasilBrush]

Netscape was free for non-commercial use. I don't know what percentage of businesses were honest enough to pony up the money for a commercial license, but I guess it was enough to support them in the days before MS bundled IE with Windows.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Midnight Thunder]

It does, but you should never under-estimate the ability of people to bother reading or paying attention to such details.

Apple does have a way to deactivate iMessage, but when you leave the Apple eco-system people don't realise that something that they were taking for granted suddenly gets in the way.

BTW the knowledge page for deactivating iMessage (never tried it): http://support.apple.com/kb/TS...

Re: Anti-competitive

[LifesABeach]

Initialy, NetScape cost about $30, but it was quickly discovered that browser technology wasn't that difficult to create. Prices fell quickly. Netscape, and that funny sounding browser called Mozilla were free. And as I recall, Mozilla was more friendlyer that IE; go figure that.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched away from iPhone a few weeks ago and fully aware of this issue tried to follow all the steps. Well that's an overstatement because Apple's official documentation only states to go into settings and toggle off iMessage. Surprise, surprise my mother calls me a week later asking what's wrong with my phone.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

I intentionally bought eNom's overpriced email service only to discover there is no sort of encryption... plain text POP3 and SMTP is the only option... I called them up and they promptly issued a refund.

Re: Anti-competitive

[dryeo]

Can't remember the date but I do remember that some of the early Netscape licenses allowed to use it indefinitely for evaluation purposes.

Re: Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

Mozilla was a product of IE having cut the heart out of Netscape. Netscape couldn't keep up with Microsoft's rate of code improvements because the code quality in Netscape was so bad. So the answer was a complete do over and that was Mozilla. We are talking the years when Netscape lost their market not what they did after.

Re:Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

OK now AC so what happened? How was iMessage configured? What accounts are bound to it? Is the device still registered to your account...?

Re:Anti-competitive

[Kaenneth]

No, it wouldn't have, the court (in the WMP case) provided a list of files to remove.

With multi-million dollar per day fines for arguing with them.

Re: Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

Oh I see you were saying the Netscape was always available as a free download. Well then that's just plain false. Netscape was a commercial piece of software. During the IE 2-3 days people got IE free and paid for Netscape. Microsoft giving away the browser and thus eliminating the market for Net was one of the reasons they were found guilty of antitrust violations.

Re:Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

I meant before the judgement. You have less flexibility for settlement or proposed settlement after you lose.

I do agree the court itself did a kinda lousy job on handling this problem.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Kaenneth]

'n' sku validation was a small part of a small teams job. I was once a contractor on that team (working next to the n guys, but not on it directly.), and I know that the full time employees who did the job for XP/Vista moved to other teams by the time 7 rolled around, and a lot of the knowledge must have been poorly transitioned. I wouldn't be surprised it they just forgot to assign the job to anyone.

There was a BIG push at the time of "ONLY test YOUR areas, other parts of Windows are not your job, don't bother filing bugs on them."

Re:Anti-competitive

[canadian_right]

...slimy business practices...

I don't see how a bug that will likely be fixed soon is a "slimy" business practice. Normally if an imessage doesn't go through it gets resent as a normal sms. Some sort of bug is causing the resend to not happen.

From my point of view this is frivolous lawsuit, I hope apple wins, and the plaintiffs lawyers lose a bundle.

Re: Anti-competitive

[flargleblarg]

Initialy, NetScape cost about $30, but ...

This must have been before 1994??

Because I never once paid a cent for any version of Netscape or Mozilla — and they were coming out rapidly.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

This is no different then when Blackberry was HUGE. BBM only worked with BBM. You had to go into a separate program to text. Which was apparently a terrible unconvince on BBM users.

Re: Anti-competitive

[sjames]

Not Really.

A careful read of the link will show that there was no time when you couldn't download and use it for free. There were a few periods where commercial users were supposed to pay for it on the honor system (shareware, basically).

Re: Anti-competitive

[HiThere]

They officially charged what, $30, for the browser. When I tried to buy it I ended up with a free browser and a communication telling me not to bother trying to buy it off them.

So, as far as I can tell, it was free. Possibly unless you were a business, but I tried to buy it for use at work. There was also an official free trial period that was a renewable 6 months, IIRC.

I suppose that you could argue that Netscape's browser was officially non-free, but in practice it was free. And Mosaic, or some such, was officially free.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Nowadays, Netscape Navigator has been forked a couple times and the surviving branch is called Firefox, and at $0 its price went down significantly.

Don't forget Seamonkey which is a direct descendent of Netscape Navigator/Communicator.

Re: Anti-competitive

[HiThere]

Not so. Netscape officially charged for their browser, but I was never able to pay them for it. And it was based on Mosaic(?) which was free from the beginning.

Re: Anti-competitive

[HiThere]

Seamonkey is nice, but it doesn't appear to be maintained. The Debian repository has a version that claims to be obsolete, and the version on the Seamonkey web site won't compile. The executable won't run. (OTOH, I'm using Debian testing. Perhaps it works well with a stable install.)

Re:Anti-competitive

[HiThere]

unhhh.... the judge (the first judge) in the trial looked at their testimony, and went off, and when he came back, he believed that he had removed it from his copy of MSWind. I don't know whether he had actually removed it or not, of course.

Re: Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

I don't know. I remember getting it free a bunch of ways as part of other commercial packages. But I also remember people at a workplace buying a 10 license pack and I certainly remember paying for Netscape Server (again business).

Re: Anti-competitive

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

That's not quite accurate. When people got IE for free people still didn't want it. What then happened is that MS bundled it with 98, then people were forced to use it.

It was after people were forced to use it that it took off.

In other words ( wait for it ) MS couldn't give IE away, they had to force you to take it.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Maxmin]

Netscape Navigator was effectively free. I never paid for it, and consumer endusers rarely paid for Netscape. There was never a requirement, you could just download and install. I don't know anybody non-corporate users who actually opened their wallet for it.

Netscape *was* sold in computer and software shops, online and by mailorder, for a brief time.

Corporations bought Netscape Enterprise Server (for which I wrote code), and paid for desktop licenses - sometimes. I guess you could say the free browser was a loss leader, to stimulate enterprise sales.

Trivia: Netscape Enterprise Server ran a server-side Javascript implementation that was pretty good. Database access, shared objects... it was kind of like early server Java.

Re: Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

OK that's fair. It was however commonly sold or bundled. That's the point I was making that browsers were a cost item for companies and for individuals they got it with a paid ISP account.

Re: Anti-competitive

[jbolden]

When were people forced to use it? They could easily switch at any time. My experience was that people who rarely used the web often used IE (2,3), though more used Netscape while people who used the web a lot used Netscape. I.E. 4 was so good that there was a complete shift.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Chewbacon]

Seems to be an oversight on apples part. But then it should easily be fixed with making it easier to change this info via a website login. A service they don't provide, so maybe they're playing dumb.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

A bug that will be fixed soon? I swapped from iPhone 2 years ago and had this exact nightmare. Apples support forums were filled with people having a hard time because of this shit.
If it gets fixed soon, then it is obvious that they purposefully held out on fixing what you deem a bug.

Re: Anti-competitive

[HiThere]

OK. I was talking about the browser, and a singleton license. I never tried to buy a 10-pack or a Server package.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Plumpaquatsch]

Microsoft got slammed not for making it free but for claiming it was so integrated into the operating system that it could not be removed.

More precisely, they got slammed for violating the 1994 consent decree in wich they agreed not to tie other Microsoft products to Windows. The claim that it was integrated was a try to convince the judge it wasn't a separate product, but a feature of Windows.

Re: Anti-competitive

[i.kazmi]

not true...i tried using netscape navigator under windows 98 since navigator had tabs which ie lacked, a week or so later i was back to using ie because i had had enough with the crashes that plagued netscape, this was in 1999, did i mention that i was on a computer with a then powerful p3 (500mhz) processor? it wasn't just that MS started bundling ie with win98, the competition was complacent (to put it politely), i hate MS for what they did after they had dominance in the browser market (and for several other misdeeds) but lets not try to rewrite history

Re: Anti-competitive

[i.kazmi]

IE definitely played a part in ushering in the era of free browsers, before IE4 came bundled with win98, netscape navigator was a paid product for business users. Also, by your logic, iMessage comes bundled with an expensive (over-priced?) piece of hardware so any benefits the end-users got in the form of a reduction in the prices of sms are moot...

Also, if memory serves sms prices were decreasing without iMessage what with FB messenger and Whatsapp and gTalk, iMessage's contribution to the whole affair is negligible since it was so late to the party

Re: Anti-competitive

[BalthCat]

As a residential user from 1996, I had Netscape and never once paid for it. I don't know anyone who has. It's possibly my ISP paid for it. Was that a thing?

Re: Anti-competitive

[Altus]

No, it does not. I had a friend switch from an iPhone to a android. IT clearly indicates that the messages failed and if you tap them again it asks if you want to send it as a text message. The thing is the fail takes a few seconds and most people don't wait to see if a message actually sent before they jump off to doing something else.

Also, the woman's ability to send and receive texts was not hampered at all. She cannot receive the iMessages that her friends are trying to send her but she can text them and she can receive actual texts from anyone. Certainly it would be good for apple to be invalidating iMessage accounts that go off line like that the way they do with push notifications and I suppose that could be pushed back to the receiving phone to take that person off of the iMessage path. As it is the sender is best off removing the old messages and sending a new one to re-set it to text, that could be done automatically.... but it is actually the person sending the message that is experiencing the bug, the person who switched to android has a fully functional phone. I'm not sure she has much of a case here.

Re: Anti-competitive

[david_thornley]

When I got it, it was free for personal use, and IIRC $50/seat for use in commercial enterprises. I never heard of anybody paying for it, though.

Re:Anti-competitive

[david_thornley]

The HTML engine was pretty integrated. Later versions of IE were separated from the HTML engine, but it wouldn't surprise me to find that this came a lot later. (I wasn't using Microsoft stuff much at the time.)

Re:Anti-competitive

[david_thornley]

Thing is, people don't read, so anything that requires following instructions doesn't "just work", which Apple aspires to (and generally does a good job on). I'd say that having instructions to follow when doing something the average person wouldn't expect instructions for is making it hard.

Re:Anti-competitive

[werepants]

That's bullshit. Why the hell should I expect that I'll have to go through extra hoops to get text messages to work when I switch away from an Apple device? When I get a new phone, it should work as long as I go through the activation process for that new phone. I just did this recently, and discovered after quite a bit of troubleshooting (it isn't immediately obvious that texts aren't going through/you aren't receiving them) that there was a big problem here.

The only solution that has worked so far is to have every person with an iPhone that I ever messaged with change their contact settings for me to turn off the iMessage notifications. I have no issues with technical problems cropping up. That isn't a big deal. The problem is that Apple knows about the problem, but refuses to fix it and leaves it as a customer service issue for the carriers and non-Apple phone owners to deal with. That's anti-competitive behavior if ever I saw it.

To add injury to insult, when you call Apple about solving the problem, they happily offer to reset their server settings for a $20 fee per iPhone. So, they can fix this trivially - they just want to make it as painful as possible. Sue them to oblivion, I say.

Re:Anti-competitive

[craigminah]

When I switched from Honda to Nissan I couldn't use my stockpile of Honda oil filters...should I sue Honda for not using the same oil filters as everyone else? WTF is wrong with people expecting iMessages (obviously an Apple take on messaging) to work on BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phones, and every other phone out there? It's idiotic.

Re:Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, are getting screwed.

I pay £10/mo, and for my coin I get unlimited texts and data, and 250 minutes.

It's worth noting that I own my phone outright and always have.

Re:Anti-competitive

[werepants]

Apple turns on iMessage by default. It isn't as though I went and sought out an app to give me extra messaging features. Merely having an iPhone makes this happen, and then moving away from an iPhone means the new phone doesn't work right. Imagine that an Apple computer by default instituted a fancy "internet enhancement" on your WiFi router that would cause any future device to be unable to download... that is essentially what we're talking about here, hijacking your default texting protocols, which offer some whiz-bang features, but subsequently interfere with service when the user switches away.

If they were up front about this, made it an opt-in policy, or fixed it on their end without an asinine fee, it would be fine. As it is, it harms the carriers, competitors, and ex-users, so they don't do anything about it.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Me either.

Re: Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

Netscape is now sea monkey

good

[Anonymous Coward]

Not an Apple hater, but I went through all of the correct steps to disconnect iMessage when switching to Android and had the exact same issues. Text messages wouldn't come through from iPhone users, at all, period. This is completely within Apple's control even if they aren't claiming it- the SMS protocol should always be used as a backup when iMessage transmission doesn't successfully complete. Otherwise, it's purely noncompetitive and is a maneuver to keep you on Apple's platform.

Re:good

[ernest.cunningham]

What a ridiculous statement. In some markets, SMS messages cost for each and every one a non insignificant amount. An iPhone user is notified if the iMessage is not delivered. You can also choose in the message settings on your iPhone to automatically send via sms if iMessage delivery failed. Some people wouldn't want that to happen so it is a user choice. Apple shouldn't be held responsible because some people are incompetent to read that their iMessage was not delivered.

Re:good

[Dahamma]

You can also choose in the message settings on your iPhone to automatically send via sms if iMessage delivery failed.

Yeah, that's what I don't understand. So, she's suing because she can't figure out the iOS settings menu?

Re:good

[p.g.king]

Yeah I've looked all through my Galaxy S4 and can't find this iOS settings menu you speak of. Not that'd it'd help, since it's about the people sending me the texts...

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

Its the OTHER persons iPhone that tries to send via their imess not her phone.

Re:good

[jbolden]

It was on the iPhone you got rid of. Now you have to go to support.apple.com and let Apple know you no longer want your old phone / number associated with your iCloud account. That takes about 30 seconds.

The people sending you texts though have the right to whatever behavior they want.

Re:good

[Dahamma]

Ok, correction.

So, she's suing because she's too clueless to figure out how to deactivate iMessage support on her number?

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS...

http://www.samsung.com/us/supp...

Both Apple and Samsung have clear solutions to this if anyone cares to ask. How is that worthy of a lawsuit?

Re:good

[p.g.king]

Isn't that exactly what people have been saying they've done and still get problems, such as this from a few days ago: http://www.businessinsider.com...

Or

http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

Re:good

[jbolden]

I think Business Insider wrote a shocking BS piece of journalism. For one thing they didn't explain what iMessage is and how it works. For example it is not an alternative to SMS but rather a free low end Universal Communication system. In terms of disassociating it from a phone number both findmyphone and support.apple.com have ways to do that easily.

The fact that the Business Insider article was this poorly researched and thought through shows that they are sucky journalists. A good article would have more than a paraphrase from a support technician but rather on the record comments from Apple. Especially when they are already all over the internet. And on the developer site in excruciating detail.

So in some sense this is what Business Insider is saying, and I'm saying the on the record sources are far better. Business Insider did a terrible job with this article.

Re:good

[p.g.king]

Perhaps it is poor journalism, perhaps apple can easily do this. It doesn't really matter much, the point is that there are apparently people out their suffering from this problem and despite talking to apple support can't fix it in 30 seconds as you suggest.

Now personally I don't have the mentality of, something doesn't work exactly how I want it to, therefore I'm going to sue, so on that basis alone I really hope this doesn't fly.

That however doesn't mean there isn't a genuine problem out there, which to many non-technically literate people out there who won't be able to solve this. Many won't know the difference between iMessage and SMS, many won't know about menu options they need to set before getting rid of the phone (assuming they had it to do so, it wasn't stolen, lost, broken etc.). Many will find their friends sending them texts and them not receiving them, they won't immediately (if ever) realise the root cause and may will think it's a problem with their new handset, rather than related to their old.

So should their be a lawsuit on this, No, should Apple be being more proactive about a general fix which people don't have to think about, Yes - indeed the people I know who are into Apple products always tell me how easy it all is, this sounds far from that ideal.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that people have to do extra steps can be considered an anti-competitive behaviour, unless Apple can very clearly explain why it absolutely _needs_ user interaction (or at least, why a solution that "just works" would be a significant effort). If it can't the court may well conclude that causing issues for competitors is the _purpose_.
For this you need to note in particular that neither the receiver nor the sender did any steps to activate or request this feature and that Apple provides a way to disable the fallback to SMS for those who do not want to risk the costs - which justifies the argument that those who did not enable it expect their messages to be sent as SMS if they are not reliably delivered otherwise.

Re:good

[jbolden]

If they are on an iPhone:

SMS is green
iMessage is light Blue

iMessage users they can switch to a video call with facetime or use facetime audio all from within the messaging application. No, no, no... we aren't playing this game that users weren't told many many times what the difference is. My technically illiterate father understands that SMS (green) goes out a reliable voice radio available most anywhere while iMessage goes out a different radio that he only gets on major highways and population centers. Over and over and over again Apple made the difference explicit to these users. They requested Appel do something and are now complaining that Apple is doing what they requested. That's like saying people getting off a plane to Florida are suffering because the airline took them to Florida, and how were they supposed to know to look at their ticket.

And of course they are able to solve this. First off many of them have iPads or Macs so they are likely still getting the messages. So they know where they are going, they can literally see them going there. And if they don't have other devices, they have friends who do and went through this. But even if the iPhone was their only device, and they don't ask anyone all they have to do is think for 10 seconds. "Hmm... my friends are sending me messages and they are still going to my device. But when I look at my friend's screens it shows the messages they meant to send me are going out iMessage. Which means Apple still thinks my device is active. Wow better tell Apple it isn't...." Come on. We expect this level of competency in every other area of life. In 2014 we expect people to understand the concept of computer accounts and the distinction between the web and their local computer.

Many will find their friends sending them texts and them not receiving them, they won't immediately (if ever) realise the root cause and may will think it's a problem with their new handset, rather than related to their old.

Dude you are on /. This isn't a problem with either handset. I can associate n-numbers with a handset or m-handsets with a number. It has nothing to do with handsets. If handset X has number Y and I can associate number Z from another handset with it and not associate Y. Frankly were it not for Apple's security feature to prevent you from hijacking phone numbers I could associate numbers I don't even own with my iMessage account.

should Apple be being more proactive about a general fix which people don't have to think about, Yes

I'm still unclear how the system is broken. If I lose my Apple handset I still want my iMessages to get to my computer or iPad. The default is exactly the behavior I want. I want Apple to work to try and get messages to me as aggressively as possible. That's the setup we are talking about. If I didn't want that I'd choose a different configuration.

Certainly a page on Apple's website explaining this would be useful. But really the only people who know that number X switched from an iPhone to an Android are the carriers. If there is going to a fix the obvious fix is they let Apple know and Apple sends an email to the end user with instructions. But still everyone is going to say how people don't read emails from companies....

Re:good

[gnasher719]

Yeah, that's what I don't understand. So, she's suing because she can't figure out the iOS settings menu?

She sold her phone, so she hasn't got an iOS settings menu anymore. It's not obvious what things you have to do before you sell a phone. Maybe there should be an app for it - "Selling my phone" which reminds you of all the things you need to do before you sell it, does them for you if possible, and finally wipes the phone so the buyer can use it with their own account.

Next thing would be to go to some Apple support site. Which should be easy, but may be difficult for some. Especially if you use the old and new phone for communication and not much for internet access. She could go to an Apple Store; they will fix the problem. If she forgot her Apple ID, it may be a problem (on the other hand, any of her friends who tried to contact her should have that information).

Finally, there is the possibility that there is an easy method that works - for 99.9% of the people. And some bug keeps it from working for 0.1%.

Re:good

[imunfair]

I've dealt with this issue for people at work, and it's enough of a pain that for business accounts you just pony up the extra cash for a new iPhone, rather than trying to explain to multiple clients why their text messages are failing.

I'm glad someone is suing Apple for it, because it's a terrible design to hijack SMS messages without explicit user permission - especially if you don't immediately switch back over to using normal SMS after a failed iMessage delivery. It should be automatic, or at very most one manual resend - but they require multiple failures to be manually resent before switching back.

I really don't understand why anyone would defend this behavior since transparently hijacking any type of data without permission is obviously a violation of user trust, and possibly a privacy issue as well.

Re:good

[jbolden]

Well for one thing you are wrong. They ask permission. To configure this you have to either type in an existing iCloud account name and password and to first set it up you have to do quite a bit more.

As for hijacking they aren't hijacking. The sender owns the data until receipt and the sender is explicitly going out via. iMessage. This is about recipients telling senders that they would rather receive iMessage than SMS when they wouldn't. Apple's servers are computers, they do what you ask them to do. If you tell them you would rather get iMessage than SMS how are they supposed to know you were lying?

As for not switching back to SMS... iMessage isn't just an SMS replacement. SMS doesn't allow me to respond to a text message with a VideoChat or send files. iMessage is a low end UC system messaging is just part of that. The purpose of iMessage messaging is to deliver to devices that don't have voice radios and thus cannot receive SMS: computers, iPods, iPads as well as phones.

It should be automatic, or at very most one manual resend

It is better than that. Apple notifies the sender of the status of their message and allows the sender to determine the appropriate action. The sender can clearly see that the message was successfully sent to the iMessage server but not delivered to any device. They are the ones deciding that this wasn't a high priority message and it is OK to wait. The sender can choose to go SMS if they want, there is a manual resend. The fact you didn't know this is evidence of how shoddy this complaint is.

I really don't understand why anyone would defend this behavior since transparently hijacking any type of data without permission is obviously a violation of user trust

It absolutely is. On the other hand providing an online service and doing what users ask them to do is not a violation of user trust it is providing the service users asked for.

I've dealt with this issue for people at work, and it's enough of a pain that for business accounts you just pony up the extra cash for a new iPhone, rather than trying to explain to multiple clients why their text messages are failing.

No offense but I can't understand why they would have someone who doesn't know jack about iMessage being responsible for fixing messaging issues. If they want to have iPhones they should have Apple people supporting them or phone support should be going out of house. That being said if this is a work computer then provisioning is handled via. the MDM and deregistering with iMessage can happen at the MDM level. Frankly work iPhones should be configured to use the company's internal messaging server not Apple's and just being getting a relay from Apple.

Re:good

[thegarbz]

The way I understand it is that an iMessage can still be delivered to another device. I.e. if the user has an iPad or their computer set up. So when you send a message expecting it to end up on someone's phone they don't get it because they still have their computer setup, but if they never check their computer because they typically only look on their phone, .... how is iMessage supposed to know the message was not delivered?

By all accounts it's a common enough problem that other vendors offer guidance on their website on the specific issue. That sounds like something a little more serious than "silly user error". It sounds more like Apple may have designed something that intentionally makes abandoning the system difficult.

But we'll give them a pass in this case because they give the user an opt-out box. Because we always give companies a pass when they provide opt-out options right?

Re:good

[Paradise Pete]

Now you have to go to support.apple.com and let Apple know you no longer want your old phone / number associated with your iCloud account. That takes about 30 seconds.

Sure, but in the mean time senders shouldn't be getting "delivered" notices. But they are. That's the problem. I'm an Apple fan, but Messages has issues. Lots of them.

Re:good

[BitZtream]

Certainly a page on Apple's website explaining this would be useful.

http://support.apple.com/kb/ts...

http://www.samsung.com/us/supp...

http://www.htc.com/www/support...

but still everyone is going to say how people don't read emails from companies....

In the last ignorant rant about this posted just a day or so before this story, it was pointed out that their provider DID in fact send them an email that told them what they had to do when they switched phones.

At some point, the user has to actually pay attention to what they are doing and put some personal effort into it.

Re:good

[sjwt]

RTFA,
Despite it supposed to be that ways, it does not always work.

Re:good

[ganjadude]

just because you didnt have a problem , doesnt mean other people dont. Remember how stupid the avg person is, then remember that 1/2 the people are stupider than he is.

Re:good

[ganjadude]

First off many of them have iPads or Macs so they are likely still getting the messages. So they know where they are going, they can literally see them going there.

{citation needed}

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

The fuck do you mean "Universal"? So it has a desktop client, an android client, and a web client?

Cause if the answer is "well, it's iDevice only", then it's not fucking universal. It's about 20%-eversal.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

Why shouldn't people be getting delivered messages when the message was successfully delivered? iMessages work also on your iPad, iPod touch and Mac.

Re:good

[jbolden]

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT...

Re:good

[jbolden]

"Universal Communication" is an industry standard term of a communication system designed to access the user anywhere. The better ones are tied to PBXes which iMessage is not. So for example if X is trying to reach Y:

If Y is at his desk at home he gets notified at home via. a server application
If Y is at work he gets notified at work
If Y's cellphone can be reached he gets notified there
If Y is at his mother's house with no cellphone the system calls her number (assuming Y checked in to let it know)

etc...

The main thing is that X doesn't need to worry about how to get in touch with Y. Y let's the system know how he wants to be contacted.

iMessage is part of a low end UC system that Apple is providing free. The good ones come from the PBX vendors like Cisco, Avaya, Shortel...

Re:good

[jbolden]

The only way a sender would be getting a delivered notice is if some other device picks it up. What you probably want is "read" which is a status to indicate that not only has at least one device gotten the message but a human has interacted with it in some way, If the recipient has that configured then the sender would be aware that the message was delivered but not read.

Re:good

[jbolden]

No it doesn't always work. But this controversy is about a fiction. iMessage works pretty well if the sender is paying attention. It ain't bad for free.

Cisco, Avaya, IBM, Microsoft all have better UC systems if you want better.

Re:good

[jbolden]

OK thank you I stand correct this is even a dumber complaint then I originally thought.

Re:good

[Anonymous Coward]

I was aware of the issue, paid attention, shut off the iMessage and still had issues. BTW the instructions from Samsung are outdated.

Re:good

[xski]

At some point, the user has to actually pay attention to what they are doing and put some personal effort into it.

Ding! Ding ! Ding! Ding!

You just nailed it spot on.

Perhaps this is why we call them 'users' (and why we're the 'other' industry that refers to its customers as 'users').

Re:good

[Sancho]

I suspect the problem is that you also associate e-mail addresses with your iMessages. If someone sends to your e-mail address instead of your phone number, it can't fall back to SMS. I don't know why it would say "Delivered"--and I suspect it doesn't. But the problem in this case would be the sender not using the phone number to try to send the message.

Re:good

[imunfair]

You really sound like an Apple sales person. It's weasley to claim that a novice user enabling knows they've given permission to Apple to reroute their messages. For the handful of people that I've dealt with on the issue they had no idea.

You're also making a lot of things out to be obvious that really aren't. If you switch phones without disabling iMessaging (because you didn't know it was on in the first place), other Apple users will continue sending your texts via that route. The non-obvious fix is to log into the Apple site and delete the phone from your account, after which it will take up to 24 hours to stop delivering texts via iMessage.

At that point it starts failing them for the senders - and allowing them to resend via SMS. However, instead of just always using SMS from the first failure it requires repeated manual resends before it remembers. There's a reason that phone salesmen I've talked to think it's an intentional tactic to lock people into Apple. It could just be a shortsighted design from people who think they're the best, but either way it needs to be fixed in a clear and logical way.

In other words, it sounds like you have a lot of theoretical knowledge on how iMessaging should work fantastically - without a grasp of how the convoluted design can go very wrong.

Re:good

[jbolden]

It's weasley to claim that a novice user enabling knows they've given permission to Apple to reroute their messages. For the handful of people that I've dealt with on the issue they had no idea.

Really? How do they think that buying an iPhone suddenly allows their SMS to support things like reply by video chat?

The non-obvious fix is to log into the Apple site and delete the phone from your account, after which it will take up to 24 hours to stop delivering texts via iMessage.

I'm not sure why that's non obvious. If I change my email address I have to log onto the server so that it bounces replies with my new email address otherwise my friends will keep using the old one.

At that point it starts failing them for the senders - and allowing them to resend via SMS.

The senders won't see iMessage as an option after the disassociation. That being said, ,ost senders will have automatic fallback to SMS enabled. Moreover, the senders always had the option to resend via. SMS when they saw that the message wasn't delivered even with the intended recipient not having made the change.

However, instead of just always using SMS from the first failure it requires repeated manual resends before it remembers.

No it doesn't. If iMessage doesn't know how to deliver, which is the case after disassociating the number, then the phone's default is to immediately use SMS. That sort of shift is a regular expected repeated behavior for iPhone users that they are (or should be) familiar with.

It could just be a shortsighted design from people who think they're the best, but either way it needs to be fixed in a clear and logical way.

The fix is easy. Carriers start notifying Apple when the phonenumber is ported away from iPhone. Then Apple can do the disassociation by themselves. Other than that, someone has to tell Apple to stop providing the service the user requested and the logical person to do that is the user.

Re:good

[Dahamma]

That's silly. Didn't it take "extra steps" to switch a phone number to a new phone (the answer is: yes). So it's one more step. OH NOOOO!

Fact is since 90% of the texts I send are to iPhones I don't need to pay for a ridiculous SMS plan. Many people get a huge benefit out of the feature. It's main point is to do an end around the ass-raping fees telcos charge for SMS (honestly it was amazing that Apple was able to bully them into allowing it). So, you need to take one extra step to disable the feature, BFD.

Re:good

[Dahamma]

Finally, there is the possibility that there is an easy method that works - for 99.9% of the people. And some bug keeps it from working for 0.1%.

Which is apparently the case. Good luck suing for that. Precedent is overwhelmingly against you...

Re:good

[bhiestand]

This happened to a colleague, who most certainly followed all the instructions and made a dozen calls to Apple. Two weeks ago. Still can't get texts from iPhone users. This is squarely on Apple.

Let me guess, you're one of those admins who requires a 16+ character password with at least 2 lower, upper, special and numerics, changed every 30 days, and you get mad about "lusers" forgetting their passwords?

Re:good

[werepants]

That isn't the problem. The problem is that any person you have iMessaged with in the past now can't message you. What's worse, the only fix is for each of those contacts to change a setting within their phone. So it isn't a technical problem I have to deal with, it is a technical problem that anybody I've iMessaged before, ever, has to deal with.

The thing that makes it anti-competitive is that Apple knows about the issue but has left it unaddressed, presumably because it impacts ex-customers of theirs, and therefore at first seems to be the fault of the new non-Apple device or the carrier. It amounts to sabotaging the service of their competitor's customers.

What's worse, they can fix this trivially, because I called in recently to deal with the issue. The problem is, they charge $20 for the privilege of having them stop screwing with your SMS service.

Nokia

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm suing because I have a Nokia and feel left out.

Re:Nokia

[MichaelSmith]

I am sure Microsoft will find a way to fuck up Nokia phones.

Re:Nokia

[featurelesscube]

They already have. It's called Lumia. I miss Nokia. They used to make fantastic phones.

Re:Nokia

[ganjadude]

I dont know many people who have them but everyone I know with a lumina loves the thing. This is only about 3 people so its by no means a representation.

Anti-competitive

[Anonymous Coward]

You had to figure a lawsuit even a class action suit was bound to happen, with non-iPhone users citing anti-competitive claims.

Apple's been doing various things within their policies, or behind closed doors that is now just coming to surface, and when the mainstream press gets a hold of it, this will not be the only suit filed against them in the coming months, more then likely a year or two, with the idiot main press waiting till every other small press outlet has been reporting it for the last 5-8 years.

Which is actually funny because BBC radio seems to make these practices public far faster then the US press.

The Apple Experience

[Vinegar Joe]

I think this is insanely cool!

The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[tlambert]

The people sending you messages are not sending you SMS, they are sending you iMessages. They are sending to your contact phone number, and they have iMessage turned on to save them $$$ when sending texts to other people registered with iMessage.

Because you used to have an iPhone, and had also turned iMessage on, your phone number is in their database, and so when it's deciding what data channel to use, it looks up the phone number it's about to send to, and if it's listed in the iMessage database, it sends an iMessage to the associated AppleID instead of sending an SMS via the cellular network. This way it doesn't cost them SMS $$$ to send the message.

When you pulled the SIM from your iPhone, you stupidly failed to turn off iMessage in your settings, and then sync those settings back to the iCloud. As this knowledge base article indicates, it can therefore take up to 45 days before it starts using SMS again: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS...

Alternately, you can go to http://appleid.apple.com/ and log in with your Apple ID, and manage your account, and disable iMessage that way (typically by removing your mobile phone number, and if you don't have an land line, putting the number in for your (non-mobile) contact number instead.

Note: Once the message has been sent, either via iMessage, or SMS, from the originating phone, it's sent; you don't get a second shit. It's not like those messages are "stored up" in a system that's capable of sending SMS messages, since the decision was made on the senders iPhone, not on the back end server.

Basically, it boils down to the former iPhone user being an idiot about disengaging from the additional iPhone associated services that they opt'ed into.

But never fear, up to 45 days afterward, the switch will happen automatically, as iMessage feeds back into the configuration database that the messages sent to the number have been undeliverable via iMessage. Or, you know, they could log onto http://appleid.apple.com/ now and fix it themselves, which can take up to 24 hours to take effect, because some idiot thought NoSQL was a good idea.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[MichaelSmith]

Why don't you reply to this post because that person seems to have tried to unsubscribe from iMessage.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an iphone. I never turned on any setting related to imessages. I still received imessages from other iphone users and would be pretty annoyed if the communication failed because of switching to a new phone. Not only that, they is no indication that messages aren't being delivered. Poor setup on Apples part and clearly designed to hook people in.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[tlambert]

I have an iphone. I never turned on any setting related to imessages. I still received imessages from other iphone users and would be pretty annoyed if the communication failed because of switching to a new phone.

It's turned on by default if you set up iCloud services, which people generally do to sync their address book, apps, and other content via "the cloud". That in turn is tuned on by default if you have push notifications turned on at all (which requires an Apple ID, and is how iMessage notifications happen, generally quicker than SMS notifications over the cellular providers networks (and the carrier bridge, if the sender and recipient aren't subscribed with the same carrier in the same geographic region).

Not only that, they is no indication that messages aren't being delivered.

There's a visual indicator on the sender's phone of a green vs. a blue "talk bubble" background color to indicate something sent via iMessage vs. SMS. Yeah, this isn't terrifically called out.

The notification will occur after the 45 days have elapsed (actually, it depends on when they run the batch job; it's generally 28 days +/- 14 days). But yeah, the notification is internal to the system.

I'll note for the record that SMS message delivery is also not acknowledged, so SMS messages, like iMessage messages, are pretty much like UDP datagrams, no matter how you slice things.

Poor setup on Apples part and clearly designed to hook people in.

I think it was more a cultural blind spot; in order to anticipate this being a problem, they'd have to consider the idea that someone might want to use a phone other than an iPhone, which is kind of unthinkable if you are an engineer whose livelihood is tied to building iPhone services... "Why in heck would anyone want to use software other than the software I wrote, which is the niftiest software evar?".

They have a settings mechanism on the iPhone that would take care of this, but if you dropped your iPhone in a toilet and killed it, you wouldn't be able to use that if instead of buying a replacement iPhone, ho used something else.

There's the online mechanism via appleid.apple.com, as previously noted, but I think that's a workaround. For number portability to another phone, which generally comes with a carrier contract and a new SIM (or a CDMA ID), they'd get the notification through the phone number portability act due to the carrier contract (this is half the source of the 45 days for the automatic cutover), but slamming the SIM around between phones that are iPhones and non-iPhones, there's really no network notifications that take place back to Apple that the change has occurred.

One possible workaround, and I will bet it's the one that gets put in place, should this suit be considered to have merit, rather than being a user error (it's definitely a user error, and Apple isn't really responsible for third party equipment not having the notification back to the Apple ID to dissociate it) would be to note failure to contact on the iMessage sends more promptly, and, worst case secondary settlement, probably retransmit them via SMS gateway.

This last is unlikely to happen, since it'd need to forge the source address as the original senders phone #, rather than the gateway, which would require additional agreements with all the carriers. I'm going to guess that the carriers won't be very cooperative in this, since they made about $10B last year in SMS charges worldwide, which is why Facebook was willing to pay $19B for "WhatsApp". Why cooperate with someone who is trying to disrupt your business model and reduce your profits, after all?

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[tlambert]

Why don't you reply to this post because that person seems to have tried to unsubscribe from iMessage.

Not really my job to give them a personally clue, above and beyond the above posting, especially since they are posting AC, and I therefore can't contact them to help them directly work around whatever it is they are functionally failing to do. As an AC, there's really no way to have a conversation person to person about it.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[jbolden]

That person is an AC and claims from ACs about stuff with no explanation at all aren't worth responding to.

The fact is iMessage isn't magic. The way it works is rather clear. There are obvious visual signals for the sender about what's happening. There are no magic settings in it. Associating and disassociating devices can at a minimum be done via:
a) The device
b) findmyphone
c) support.apple.com
d) or via. Apple's phone support

This whole controversy is BS.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[jbolden]

Their are indications of sent, delivered and read for the sender. They are color coded as to whether it went out iMessage or SMS. So yes there are indications.

As for not turning on setting related to iMessage you remember: http://www.apple.com/icloud/se...
Pretty much the very first thing you did.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[tlambert]

As an IT Architect, who daily works with and for those with varying degrees of technical skills, I would disagree that the user is "an idiot". The steps you mention will certainly address the issue no doubt. What is in question is if the layperson should be aware of these steps and be capable of undertaking them "if" they forget to disable iMessage. What a class action lawsuit will do is force Apple to put in checks that look at the IMEI of the phone each time an iMessage is sent and the ack isn't received by the server from the phone in x amount of time. There is a different error message for an IMEI either offline or registered to a new user than one where the phone is simply unavailable. I can think of 5 different ways Apple can identify the device changed to a non Apple device. They haven't fixed this issue on purpose.

Messages sent via iMessage are not sent that way on the carrier back end, they are sent on the phone, via the data connection, and the IMEI or ESN/MEID is not generally sent, as it would have to be pulled out and sent in-band as part of the message in a framed header for the message on the iPhone. This would require both a software update on the iPhone, and a software update on the back end iMessage service.

Given that the iMessage service predates the current generation of iPhones, and therefore the older iPhones will not be receiving a software update, as they are incapable of running the newest version of iOS, this is not a possibility for those phones, and not a possibility to automatically deal with the issue (not to mention that the Apple ID registration on the back end would have to record both the IMEI or ESN/MEID, and for GSM, the IMSI and ICCID.

If you just switched your number over to another carrier, you are pretty much screwed without the carrier information as well, especially if the rest of the information stays the same, since the sending phone has no way in heck of knowing that that the target #'s SIM has been inserted into another phone with a different IMEI, and it's not like the Android phone is going to contact the Apple back end, and tell them about it.

There just aren't the notifications necessary from the non-iMessage enabled phone: it's a manual process at that point.

As I stated in the response to the other poster above, the carriers have basically zero incentive to cooperate by providing additional notifications in a post-switch scenario, since iMessage, like WhatsApp, undercuts their primary revenue model.

I suspect that we will be seeing the same thing with WhatsApp users who similarly undercut the carrier business model, in a way that's almost identical to the way iMessage does, but is not limited to iPhones.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, they is no indication that messages aren't being delivered.

BULLSHIT.

Maybe you haven't seen it, because your messages are being delivered, but iMessage very clearly states (in red) to the sender when a message is not delivered.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll note for the record that SMS message delivery is also not acknowledged, so SMS messages, like iMessage messages, are pretty much like UDP datagrams, no matter how you slice things.

Most carriers implement delivery confirmation for SMS and most non-Apple phones support it (back from the 1990's).

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[marka63]

Even if both parties have iPhones there are times when you want to force SMS messages and iMessage doesn't have a simple interface to do that. You have to go into settings and turn off iMessage if you want to force a SMS.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[thegarbz]

I'll note for the record that SMS message delivery is also not acknowledged, so SMS messages, like iMessage messages, are pretty much like UDP datagrams, no matter how you slice things.

One thing that SMS has going for it is the end-point is universal, and message delivery to the carrier IS acknowledged. Once the message is given to the carrier it will eventually get to a device if its turned on within a time-frame. The key here is that the target device is universal. My Galaxy S is in the toilet? Well when I unwrap my iPhone and put the SIM in I'll get my missing SMSes. Don't have time to wait, well if I pop my SIM into my 4G internet dongle I'll get the SMS on my PC.

Actually the problem is the opposite, when instant sending doesn't work or you're on the fringe of coverage you can frequently end up with multiple copies of the same SMS.

When taken to the extreme silly things do happen. I once got a new SIM card and I clearly had a recycled number. Not only was I getting calls to the number I hadn't given out yet but when I first turned activated the SIM and the "new" number I ended up getting a batch of about 10 SMSes which were previously unreceived.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

lolololol "IT Architect".

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[blagooly]

A "cultural blind spot"? Innocent mistake? No.

Does not play, interact with others. Proprietary, exclusionary design is the baseline, the goal. Designed in malfunction. Proof from long ago is in iTunes. A horrendous mess of extreme levels of overweight complexity to overcome basic USB storage functionality, corral and control user's behavior. Making it simply work would have required no effort at all. The current events are at least a direct consequence of this Apple closed culture mindset.

History being a predictor, I conclude it is intentional. Proving it will be another matter.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Related to iMessage perhaps. but none of those options seem to inform me that i just enabled IMessage to use them (i do notice people here saying the icloud requires it, but how does anyone sane assume enabling a cloud storage also magically enables a messaging system?)

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[Daniel Boisvert]

They could change the timeouts. If an iMessage is sent to a destination that's a phone number (instead of an email address), and a device configured to receive messages for that phone number has not checked in within the past 5-7 days, deactivate iMessage for that phone number until a configured device checks in again.

I agree this is mostly user error and haven't had any problems resolving it for people who've asked me about it, but people don't typically anticipate this result when switching phones, so containing the undesired effects to a shorter transition window would seem like a helpful thing to do.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[sjwt]

RTFA, unsubscribing does not always work, thats the bug that Apple has been unable to fix for a year.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[ganjadude]

"yo man, you got the stuff? roll through about 6 pm" something like that right?

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[Demonantis]

SMTP has a method for returning undeliverable messages. It would be nice for iMessage to have this. I agree though. The litigation is absurd. You will still get billed if you move without cancelling your cable service. This same thing is happening here.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[jbolden]

iCloud isn't a storage solution. It is a an application synchronization solution. It has 4 separate types of synchronization designed to work deeply with applications. One being Core Data which they talk about all the time. Messaging is one of the things it synchronizes.
email, contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, status of my browsers ..., passwords, photos, documents and data from arbitrary applications... And one of the things is notifications.

How did you think your friends who had applications on phone and iPad were staying in sync?

And it isn't magic. The setting on iOS says "enable iMessage". You didn't look, you didn't pay attention, you agreed and now you have to do fix something that you were being careless about. That's life.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[GryMor]

There is no opt in for iMessage subverting SMS, there may be an opt out, but that doesn't seem to work reliably.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[nurb432]

I ran into the same problem when i switched from apple to Android. Boss sent me a message i never got "hey, i was trying to get a hold of you earlier, what happened " This was in the early days of iMessage, before everyone really knew what was going on.

Even then, it wasn't that *hard* to figure out what was going on, and how to fix it. ( in my case i just put he sim back in and did it on the phone ) I dont think shes an idiot as much as she is a gold digger. Seems like that is the American way these days " its not fair, i'm entitled, so i'm going to sue". Sad state of affairs.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[radarskiy]

"Not really my job to give them a personally clue"

It is your job to stop lying about people doing the wrong thing when faced with evidence that they did in fact do the things that you say they were stupid not to do.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[jittles]

How is this a user error? When I try to text someone who used to have an iPhone I have to manually tell it to send it as a text message. In one place its a friend, who is a single mom, whose phone broke and couldn't afford to get another iPhone. She's tried everything in Apple's support forums and my phone still tries to iMessage her. you know, if they just had some sort of timeout for registration this would never happen. But I suppose that it would be too difficult for apple to require you to connect to Apple's servers every x days. No, that would be much too difficult. Let's just blame it on the users who want a new phone.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[jittles]

Long press on the text message and say "Send as text message."

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[tlambert]

"Not really my job to give them a personally clue"

It is your job to stop lying about people doing the wrong thing when faced with evidence that they did in fact do the things that you say they were stupid not to do.

The canonically correct way to deal with this is to disable iMessage for your phone number on your iPhone *before* you switch to another phone. I've already stated that this is potentially problematic if you drop your iPhone in a toilet, and then buy a different phone than an iPhone to replace it, and never disengage in this specific way. Everything else is a workaround. That his friends with iPhones are still sending via iMessage because his # hasn't been taken out of the back end database (by him) is not "evidence" that he's correctly removed his number from the iMessage service database, it is in fact evidence that he has *not* done so.

Re:The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[tlambert]

A "cultural blind spot"? Innocent mistake? No.

Does not play, interact with others. Proprietary, exclusionary design is the baseline, the goal. Designed in malfunction.

History being a predictor, I conclude it is intentional. Proving it will be another matter.

Proving it is going to be nearly impossible. At around the time the iPhone came out, Apple gave all its employees iPhones. There were "recycle bins" all over the Apple campus where you would throw your non-Apple iPhones. Apple engineers did not see or, largely, interact with, other phones at all.

I think this was a mistake on Apple's part, and I brought it up with the exec team at the time, since it meant that none of the engineers got to see what competitors were doing wrong relative to Apple, and vice versa, so that Apple could improve its products where the competitors were better. That's mostly because there was no acknowledgement that competitors could be better in any fashion, and for a long time, that was in fact true. At the time the iPhone was introduced, it was the best damn mobile phone ever produced by anyone, and all the bitching about a lack of MS Exchange integration and a physical Blackberry-like keyboard didn't stop Microsoft employees from buying the things in droves, and didn't stop Blackberry from basically tanking in the marketplace because it was non-competitive.

For there to have been malice, or even intent, involved in the design decisions, you'd have to show that they were even considering something other than the user experience of "Hey! I don't have to pay the global average price of $0.11 per message if we both have iPhones!". To do that, they'd have to have something other than iPhones in hand, and they'd have to consider people replacing iPhones with something else in a context of something other than "What can we do to surprise and delight this unhappy customer enough to win them back as a customer?".

The bottom line is that it's a blind spot, and it was encouraged as one by the internal culture of Apple, both in terms of engineering and marketing. Why consider engineering constraints other than those right in front of you, that's how Facebook and Google work, right? If we end up in a hole, why, we'll just iterate ourselves out of it, since there have to be small evolutionary steps between a mistake and a great product, right?

Apple has a history of screwing up rather spectacularly, in was which mostly don't matter to most customers, but really cut off future avenues of products, product add-ons, functional expansion, and so on. There's a reason that the "X" in "XML" doesn't actually mean "eXtensible" when it comes to your iTunes library, and that's part of the mistake in tying in the data model behind CoreData to the implementation so strongly that iTunes loses its cookies and rebuilds your music database if you try.

Again, it's a cultural blind spot ("Why would any software other than iTunes need to access the iTunes library? Why wouldn't you just use iTunes?"). IMO, this suit will cost a lot of money, get settled to make it go away, and change nothing.

Android users not receiving your text messages?

[Swampash]

Solution: stop interacting with poor people

Re:Android users not receiving your text messages?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a fair bit about computer security. That has resulted in two things:

1. I earn a lot of money for helping organizations with their security needs
2. I use Android rather than iOS

Your arrogance is misplaced.

Re:Android users not receiving your text messages?

[arbiter1]

Poor people? or people that gain some sense not wanting to be locked in to apple nickle and dime bullshit?

The former iPhone user is an idiot.

[JasonWhitehurst]

As an IT Architect, who daily works with and for those with varying degrees of technical skills, I would disagree that the user is "an idiot". The steps you mention will certainly address the issue no doubt. What is in question is if the layperson should be aware of these steps and be capable of undertaking them "if" they forget to disable iMessage. What a class action lawsuit will do is force Apple to put in checks that look at the IMEI of the phone each time an iMessage is sent and the ack isn't received by the server from the phone in x amount of time. There is a different error message for an IMEI either offline or registered to a new user than one where the phone is simply unavailable. I can think of 5 different ways Apple can identify the device changed to a non Apple device. They haven't fixed this issue on purpose. Creating an issue like this undoubtedly ensures a percentage of users return their Android phones and get another Apple device to fix the texting issue thereby ensuring Apple revenue. You can bet Apple will weigh the cost of the suit versus the customer retention revenue and either pay out and leave it the way it is or fix the problem. There's no doubt it is a problem because it's not automated and the courts will rule in favor of the user because the process is not automated.

She'll lose

[jbolden]

Let's see the evidence that Apple has

1) She at the time she bought her iPhone specifically setup an iCloud account and asked Apple to tie the messaging on a specific phone number to Apple's servers / her iCloud account.
2) She never notified Apple that she wanted them to stop doing that for her phone number.
3) She never went to the support site and disassociated the device she is no longer using from her account.

So in other words she told a computer to do something until she told it to stop, and never told it to stop. In what possible world will a court rule that "unfair competition?" This is a total BS lawsuit. Quite literally she could log onto support.apple.com and fix the problem in under 30 seconds.

Re:She'll lose

[MichaelSmith]

But from the users POV the apple device and all its infrastructure is gone. They got a new phone. Why should they have to switch off stuff on the old phone?

Re:She'll lose

[jbolden]

Their iCloud account isn't gone. It is still active and fully functional. That's like saying gmail is gone from the user's POV when they sell their computer. Apple's infrastructure for managing devices (i.e. websites like support.apple.com) aren't gone. The only role the phone plays in all this is they told Apple to associate a physical device with a phone number with their iCloud account and never bothered to tell them to not do that. Why shouldn't they have to switch stuff off? How are Apple's servers supposed to know they got rid of their phone if they don't tell them? Magic? If the carriers notified handset manufacturers when there was a provisioning change on their devices then OK Apple could be held responsible but until then I'm not sure what people expect here.

It is a computer. It does what you tell it to do. The settings are clear. Apple's messaging on this has been unequivocal that the services exists to establish connections between multiple devices for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... The people complaining have consistently said stuff that indicates they don't actually understand even the most basic concepts about Apple's low-end free Universal Communication system.

Finally there are all sorts of indications for the sender about what's going on. The senders are in fact notified. So the idea this is quietly failing for them is not just poorly researched but fiction.

Re:She'll lose

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot that Apple also knows:
4) She (probably) never explicitly agreed to use iMessage
5) Neither she nor the others disabled SMS fallback, so they definitely want SMS to be used if necessary
6) The phone that was use to enable iMessages (and whose number was linked to iMessage) has not fetched them in days/weeks/months and thus obviously is not receiving any of them

Particularly 6) is fairly damning. And a usability issue even for iPhone users that are just for some time in a place with no internet connection but normal phone service (yes, that can happen).

Re:She'll lose

[jbolden]

She (probably) never explicitly agreed to use iMessage

Of course she did. This isn't a magic configuration. When she started her phone it asked her if she wanted iCloud with integrated messaging and she proceeded to fill out forms to get it.

Neither she nor the others disabled SMS fallback, so they definitely want SMS to be used if necessary

SMS fallback is for the sender having a failure not for recipients. The sender's iPhone can't tell whether the recipient's data radio has good connection or not.

The phone that was use to enable iMessages (and whose number was linked to iMessage) has not fetched them in days/weeks/months and thus obviously is not receiving any of them

That is Apple's behavior. After 45 days it severs the link.

Particularly 6) is fairly damning. And a usability issue even for iPhone users that are just for some time in a place with no internet connection but normal phone service (yes, that can happen).

I know it can happen. It happens to me. The sender sees that their messages aren't getting delivered and goes out SMS or voice if it is important or let's it wait if it isn't.

Re:She'll lose

[Anonymous Coward]

A company sends mail to a customer's PO box.
The customer pays for her maid to pick up her mail from her PO box.
The customer changes her maid, but the new maid doesn't pick up mail from PO boxes.
The customer no longer gets mail sent to that PO box.

Should the customer sue the local postal service because she no longer gets her mail?

Re:She'll lose

[ganjadude]

The difference is that I can access gmail on ANY device connected to the internet (ok maybe not ANY device but you know what im saying) Without apple lockin can i access icloud?(I dont know)

Re:She'll lose

[jbolden]

I understand the difference but read GP's claim. GP's claim was that it was unreasonable for end users to understand the distinction between an account in the cloud and their client on a device. Apple sells their cloud services as part of the device strategy. Google gives away their cloud services and then sells data about you to advertisers. The analogy would be accessing gmail without ads and that Google would charge you for.

In specific. You can't access iMessage. Some parts of iCloud will work on Windows computers but the messaging service is not one of them. Messaging is integrated into the unified notification system on OSX, iOS devices. It isn't meant to be cross platform. The people who turn it are asking for a vertical integrated proprietary experience at the expense of cross platform.

Re:She'll lose

[ganjadude]

thank you for that information, I guess the best thing for apple to do would be to allow imessage on windows devices (IE antitrust anyone?) that way all those iphone users can support their devices without buying an overpriced mac. I dont know the answer here, but this was bad programming if you ask me

Never...

[Alioth]

Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.

A lot of people are posting that Apple had some sort of malicious intent (lock people in) when really it's more likely they just didn't think it through properly. The whole thing can easily be solved just by making a simple, easy to find webpage to turn iMessage off. Even customers who aren't switching may find it useful (abroad with your iPhone with data turned off because it's ridiculously expensive, but left the iPad at home and forgot to turn it off so your iPad is happily getting your messages but your phone not, would be an example where it would be useful).

Re:Never...

[oic0]

Unless money is involved.

Re:Never...

[Anonymous Coward]

imho the locking in is IMessage itself (even in a perfectly working order) this is a different issue showing what being locked in to iMessage can do (and actually did)

Re:Never...

[radarskiy]

"The whole thing can easily be solved just by making a simple, easy to find webpage to turn iMessage off."

It exists. It doesn't always work. That is why people complain.

This is a real problem and not an Android problem.

[zoid.com]

This is a very real problem. My wife had her iphone 4s stolen and activated my daughter's old iphone 4s on her verizon line. About a week later she tells me that many of her friends are saying that she isn't responding to txt messages and she says she isn't getting them. This goes on for weeks. It turns out that she didn't turn on icloud on the new (old) iphone so all of the imessages were going to never never land. It's not obvious at all what is happening.

Never underestimate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Never underestimate the predatory nature of lawyers and the stupidity of juries and judges.

PEBKAC

[SJ]

In other news, a friend of mine recently switched to Google Chat. Why hasn't he responded to all my Skype messages? Is he not getting them?

Re:PEBKAC

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not the case of two separate systems not being able to communicate per sey. This is a situation where one service acts as a wrapper for the other without being explicitly told about it.

A good example of this would have been if Blackberry had automatically routed all SMS/MMS messages over their BBM network when users happened to have an associated PIN. This would save on data costs and allow more use of the BBM network as a result. However what happens if people leave BlackBerry and (up to a year ago) and were no longer were able to use BBM? Messages would be sent over BBM to a no longer monitored account and problems would ensue.

As stands, Apple seems to be unable reliably detect if a user is no longer using their sacred phones. The switch means its still routing through a now defunct communications channel. Given that Apple prides itself on simplistic interfaces and telling little to the user, this situation serves as an example on when such principles backfires on them.

Now I have no clue why they can't tell if their users are online or offline and route accordingly. However I did not design the system.

Re:PEBKAC

[Anonymous Coward]

The obvious difference is that the product in one scenario isn't hijacking what would otherwise be SMS.

Re:PEBKAC

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, a friend of mine recently switched to Google Chat. Why hasn't he responded to all my Skype messages? Is he not getting them?

What? Please explain, your comment makes no sense at all. Google chat and skype have nothing to do with SMS. Your comparing apple to rocks and are too stupid to see it....

Re:PEBKAC

[thegarbz]

Maybe because she switch from one chat messaging system to another. Quite a bit different than going from SMS to SMS. Now you can argue that that SMS and iMessage are two different systems. Well... they are in the same app, and it's confusing the hell out of users.

Regardless of the actual mechanics involved when one user experiences a problem it's PEBKAC. When multiple users experience multiple problems in similar ways all not expecting the outcome in question and vendors need to host webpages with dedicated instructions to circumvent the issue it is most definitely not PEBKAC.

Re:PEBKAC

[cgimusic]

It's never labelled as SMS, it's labelled as Messages. Apple simply chooses to deliver these messages over the best medium possible for the highest number of people. This is entirely the fault of users. There is no technical fix for this, the only mitigation would be to make the automatic deregistration time shorter which has its own problems.

It's better to apologize then to ask permission

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect negligence over malice.

Re:This is a real problem and not an Android probl

[SeaFox]

It turns out that she didn't turn on icloud on the new (old) iphone so all of the imessages were going to never never land. It's not obvious at all what is happening.

The first thing I would do after activating an iPhone on a plan to replace another one is sign into my iCloud account to sync all my contacts back. Not to mention remove the old iPhone from my iCloud account so my iCloud email, Safari bookmarks (and possibly saved passwords) are no longer in the thief's hands.

What about their Mail.app vs exchange groups?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I sue over that or its inconsistency in showing html mail or that gmail accounts need dropped and re-added often to get new mail?

Simple fix

[Orphis]

Isn't iMessage always associated with an email address too?
Wouldn't it be easy to send an email to people when they haven't received a message after a day?
There could be a link in the email telling people how to remove their phone number from the service and receive subsequent messages directly as SMS if they switched phone.

FFS

[Architect_sasyr]

For fucks sake, it's not like Apple have a hard thing to do here... if ( recipientLastUsed() > days(1) ) { removeFromiMessage(); } icloud/imessage "logs in" right, not hard..

Re:FFS

[clifyt]

Right now, it is this but 45 days.

When I travel, I generally take a burner phone with me so I don't get overseas charges and otherwise. I still take my iPhone, but leave it on Wifi only. And a lot of times, Wifi is still hard to come by. I can get to internet cafes where I can log in to someone else's computer, but I can't get to my own computers. And when I do get wifi? I get all my messages, sometimes a week later.

The point? For a lot of us 1 day is way too short. Maybe 45 days is too long. What is the appropriate time?

Re:FFS

[kthreadd]

A user preference would be appropriate.

Re:FFS

[clifyt]

Do you not understand the Apple way of thinking? There are few user preferences.

It may piss off the nerd aspects of me, but it also simplifies life when I'm not. Why? Because user pref here, user pref there, user pref everywhere and it never stops.

I use to design sounds for synths. A few hundred preferences to get a particular sound. I could almost deal with this because it was an art. And then I realized everyone else had this same preference at their fingertips but would rather buy the sounds and never touch them. Why? Because most people don't give a fuck, they just want something that works.

Back to the point, if someone actually gave a fuck and understood what was going on, they would have followed the directions before getting rid of the phone, or worked with support for the 10 minutes it would take to reset it. But they didn't...because they didn't give a fuck and expected it to be automatic without having to think about it.

Re:FFS

[ganjadude]

Id say a week by default, but id also have a setting so the user can decide how long or short as well. but thats me

Re:FFS

[Anonymous Coward]

A user preference that no one would set (just like no one noticed they can turn off imessages before selling their phone, or turn it off from Apple's website after the fact)? How does that solve anything?

Re:FFS

[clifyt]

This was my point as well. I don't think these people got it.

Just Works

[tuppe666]

Apple doesn't make it hard. She just didn't follow instructions prior to selling her device and she hasn't followed instructions after selling her device to fix it. The hard part is pure fiction.

I find it constantly disappointing the repeated lie of "just works". The truth is this is only partially true even within Appleverse, there is no good reason why complicated workarounds are necessary. The fact that fruit lovers like yourself are prepared to defend, an anticompetitive move.

Personally I think this kind of bullshit is driving customers (like the one in the lawsuit) to android. You can only be abusive while your on top, and Apple peaked last year with market share; its devices are behind the competitors...they are the little overpriced phones, and they need to buy a headphone company to remain cool.

Re:Just Works

[jbolden]

I find it constantly disappointing the repeated lie of "just works".

Apple offers a UC system that is easier to install and configure than other UC systems. That's what "just works" means. It doesn't mean that if you turn a UC system on, don't bother to turn it off that it will magically know you don't want it anymore which is what the Android people suppose it should do. This would be like an article being critical of gmail for not disabling email when you sell your computer.

Personally I think this kind of bullshit is driving customers (like the one in the lawsuit) to android.

There is data on conversions. It has been pretty consistent that the flow is almost entirely in the other direction.

Apple peaked last year with market share

Actually not it hasn't. Among phones $500 and up its marketshare continues to grow and they are gaining in the $400-500 category. They have no share in $400 on down because they don't make devices at the price points where the growth is.

As for "remaining cool".... that seems like the standard "I hate Apple" babble you tend to promote like your speculation about their drops in computer sales from last year.

Re:Just Works

[Paradise Pete]

The fact that fruit lovers like yourself are prepared to defend, an anticompetitive move.

It's a bug, not a malicious act. It's one of the many bugs found in Messages.

Re:Just Works

[DarwinSurvivor]

Apple offers a UC system that is easier to install and configure than other UC systems. That's what "just works" means. It doesn't mean that if you turn a UC system on, don't bother to turn it off that it will magically know you don't want it anymore which is what the Android people suppose it should do. This would be like an article being critical of gmail for not disabling email when you sell your computer.

How is that the same? Gmail isn't affecting the working status of your other email accounts. iMessage likes to "take over" your text messages. If Apple wants to fuck with the SMS system offered by another company (your service provider), they need to make DAMN sure they don't break it in the process.

Re:Just Works

[mpe]

iMessage likes to "take over" your text messages. If Apple wants to fuck with the SMS system offered by another company (your service provider), they need to make DAMN sure they don't break it in the process.

e.g. have a mechanism such that if the SMS alternative is unavailable (for any reason) the sender switches back to SMS.

Re:Just Works

[jbolden]

Read this and the previous thread. This has been answered already multiple times. iMessages doesn't take over your text messages. People who want to send you SMS can send you SMS just fine. SMS continues to work perfectly.

Re:Just Works

[jbolden]

That is the default for the sender's phone. That is precisely what Apple does do for senders.

The recipients are complaining that their senders send them iMessages which
a) Some other device of their's is picking up
b) The sender would be able to clearly see that their text message was pending delivery but not picked up by any device and then they would have a choice what to do.

Re:Just Works

[BasilBrush]

e.g. have a mechanism such that if the SMS alternative is unavailable (for any reason) the sender switches back to SMS.

If that's what would make this OK, then it's OK, because that's exactly what Apple do now.

Re:Just Works

[swillden]

Unless they have an Apple device. Yeah, they still *can* send you SMS from an iPhone, but only if they know the difference, and why they should care.

Re:Just Works

[jbolden]

As far as why they should care they can see the status. If the only Apple device the recipient owns is the phone the sender will know that their messages were undelivered. As far as the difference: the difference is a blue blotch vs. a green blotch. A 3 year old can handle "blue isn't getting to him so let's try the green".

Re:Just Works

[swillden]

Assuming they think there's any significance to the color at all.

Re:Just Works

[jbolden]

Yes, assuming they notice obvious things. If they are completely oblivious to obvious things then Apple's clear notifications don't work. And in this sense like many others they would have trouble using complex equipment like computers.

Re:Just Works

[Plumpaquatsch]

Personally I think this kind of bullshit is driving customers (like the one in the lawsuit) to android. You can only be abusive while your on top, and Apple peaked last year with market share; its devices are behind the competitors...they are the little overpriced phones, and they need to buy a headphone company to remain cool.

Yeah, Google not making it hard is quite one explanation why more people switch from Android to iPhone than the other way.

Re:Just Works

[werepants]

That's bullshit. Why the hell should I expect that I'll have to go through extra hoops to get text messages to work when I switch away from an Apple device? When I get a new phone, it should work as long as I go through the activation process for that new phone. I just did this recently, and discovered after quite a bit of troubleshooting (it isn't immediately obvious that texts aren't going through/you aren't receiving them) that there was a big problem here.

The only solution that has worked so far is to have every person with an iPhone that I ever messaged with change their contact settings for me to turn of the iMessage notifications.

I have no issues with technical problems cropping up. That isn't a big deal. The problem is that Apple knows about the problem, but refuses to fix it and leaves it as a customer service issue for the carriers and non-Apple phone owners to deal with. That's anti-competitive behavior if ever I saw it.

To add injury to insult, when you call Apple about solving the problem, they happily offer to reset their server settings for a $20 fee per iPhone. So, they can fix this trivially - they just want to make it as painful as possible. Sue them to oblivion, I say.

Count me in

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI this isn't about free, regulation, the merits of iMessage, etc. It about a broken system that Apple refuses to fix.

I am actually in this boat and would gladly join this class action lawsuit.

Apple knows about this issue and has done nothing. There is no way once a number is in their system of getting it out. (imessage) People call me telling me that they sent a text. Sometimes it will fail, them I have to tell the user, do you have send as SMS feature on, if not it won't come. Now if my number was never in the imessage eco system, the message would deliver without any special settings. Calling Apple gets a sympathetic ear, but their techs have no ability to remove the number from imessage.

It would be like you switching your phone from one carrier to another and the previous carrier still routing your calls from them to the old dead line.

Re: Count me in

[Anonymous Coward]

The level of stupidity on slashdot has reached the tipping point. Good bye old friend...

Ummm No

[nurb432]

It boils down to people not reading what they agreed to. That and its brain-dead easy to undo the 'hook', and is not a process that Apple is hiding.

Switching services in many 'areas' involve some work on your part. Suck it up and follow the directions.

Re:Ummm No

[radarskiy]

"Suck it up and follow the directions."

What is your response to the people who did follow directions and are still having problems?

Re:Ummm No

[nurb432]

My response would be they are morons, and are not smart enough to have a phone in the first place.

Re:Ummm No

[radarskiy]

They are morons for having done the things you suggest that they do?

Re:Ummm No

[nurb432]

They are morons, period. As you are, for asking me stupid questions.

Before you get too excited

[iamacat]

Make sure that the person sending the message doesn't have your iCloud e-mail in your contact information. This would be another, and completely understandable problem.

Or install Hangouts for iOS as a much broader platform with cross platform everything.

Unable to receive "text" messages?

[nurb432]

Um, no apple did not prevent this. They prevented her from getting iMessages, which is proprietary. They have no obligation to figure out that you dropped apple, then magically forward them on via SMS when you ditch their 'services', and cant follow directions.

Re:This is a real problem and not an Android probl

[nurb432]

Its still a user issue and not an apple issue.

As a disclaimer i no longer use iOS products. There is plenty of 'bad' with iOS, but this isn't one of those times. iMessage was actually pretty cool, as like BBM it saved you from hitting your SMS limits ( if you have one.. ) and i think they were encrypted in transit.

The message went to your iPad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not an Apple hater, but I went through all of the correct steps to disconnect iMessage when switching to Android and had the exact same issues. Text messages wouldn't come through from iPhone users, at all, period. This is completely within Apple's control even if they aren't claiming it- the SMS protocol should always be used as a backup when iMessage transmission doesn't successfully complete.

Go check your iPad (or Mac or other iOS device). The message was successfully transmitted there and marked as complete.

This is the sort of thing that confuses iPhone to Android switchers.

Switchers with problems probable have an iPad ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that exactly what people have been saying they've done and still get problems, such as this from a few days ago: http://www.businessinsider.com...

Or

http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

These people usually have a Mac or another iOS device somewhere that successfully received the message and told the sender that it was delivered.

Ever been in iOS developer's office and a half dozen devices go "bing"? Someone sent a text message and *all* devices logged into that account received, respond to the sender and are notifying the user.

Jesus Christ, this thread

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you all joking? It's software. This is a bug in said software. Fucking fix it. /end thread

This wankery about right/wrong is petty bullshit.

Pass the blame baton! is the American pastime.

"This person is an idiot for not digging through Apple's help database to disable features that probably weren't explained all that well to her by Apple or her cell provider."

^^ This is a bullshit argument. Apple can patch iMessage to handle this and then there's little work involved for the customers at all. They'll refuse because it provides a mechanism for customer lock-in and breaks compatibility. iMessage doesn't even need to exist. It's yet another walled garden feature that locks customers in. It should be 100% compatible and failover to using the de facto standard (SMS in this case).

Apple could also better describe what's going on when you setup iMessage. Or we could see these bullshit practices and walled gardens for what they are: yet another power grab by the wealthy.

If this were MS, /. would be all up their asshole. But instead it's tech golden child Apple, that ever so open, champion of free software. It's embrace, extend, extinguish all over again, but people are championing it this time.

Re:Jesus Christ, this thread

[cgimusic]

"Apple can patch iMessage to handle this and then there's little work involved for the customers at all." Please, go ahead and explain what the fix for this is because apparently the engineers at Apple with all their fancy computer science degrees are unable to figure it out. Aside from the 45 day phone number deletion time that is already in place, what would you change?

Re:This is a real problem and not an Android probl

[thegarbz]

You're a good conditioned creature of habit aren't you.

Now if the iPhone brought up a big warning saying, "Note if you don't do this right now you may not receive text messages I would call the user an idiot." Instead I'll call them a user and you an "expert".

Re:This is a real problem and not an Android probl

[thegarbz]

Its still a user issue and not an apple issue.

What a retarded notion. Switching from one Apple device to another Apple device and then not getting services that are expected to hit a phone via a carrier automatically is most definitely an Apple issue. Just like hiding the Charms bar on the right of the screen without indication is definitely a Microsoft issue.

Providing the facility to do something does not absolve you of responsibility, and given the fact that this is such a wide spread problem EVEN AMONGST SLASHDOT USERS, it is most DEFINITELY an "Apple issue".

Re:This is a real problem and not an Android probl

[SeaFox]

iMessage is an Apple app/service and tied to iCloud. Why would I not assume I'd need to associate my iPhone with my iCloud account for it to work? But I agree that Apple's system should be smart enough to realize "this user is no longer connecting to our service, please stop handling SMS over iMessage".

Secondly, I wouldn't call making use of my iCloud address book backup being a "conditioned creature". Are you suggesting I sit there and reenter all my contacts and settings by hand when I can have them all restored for me in less than a minute by using an account I already have? I'm a bit baffled why the poster's wife hadn't already done it so she could get her apps on the new phone.

Re:This is a real problem and not an Android probl

[thegarbz]

No but you're talking about one case for one product of one specific brand. I as the non Apple manual reading techy would never assume that to get a carrier feature like text messaging to work that I need to connect my phone to the cloud. This is not the normal function of a mobile phone. Actually the way most other platforms work is that the receiving device gets a txt message and then distributes the data. I.e. My phone receives an SMS and forwards it to my cloud storage service, not the other way around. I get a new phone I don't need to sign into some cloud service for basic systems to work.

Same with contacts. I have the choice of storing my contacts on my phone (silly), external SD (less silly), syncing with computer (automatic anyway when I transfer music to it), syncing with Gmail contacts list (best idea IMO), or using a backup utility. At no point does my ability to do one thing suddenly preclude another.

That's why I said conditioned creature of habit. What you're proposing as the correct and "sensible" thing to do is foreign to people of other platforms and the rest of the mobile phone sector, hence the problems and all the how-to pages on how to do this.

Re:This is a real problem and not an Android probl

[nurb432]

via a carrier automatically

Ah, but you see its NOT "via a carrier", its via Apple's network. SMS still works. Their proprietary service, which you are no longer authorized to use, stopped working. That is a HUGE difference there, bucko.

Sounds like you are too stupid to own a phone.

I had this with my mother-in-law's phone

[Anonymous Coward]

T-Mobile pointed me to apple who said it looked like everything had been done to fix the issue. I finally found another post that suggested I reset her icloud password which made iphone users sending her a text finally get an error and then they got the option to send as sms instead of imessage. After a couple failed then send as sms their iphones gave up trying to send it as an imessage. I can see for someone who isn't retired and has a lot of contacts how disastrous this would be. The only reason she switched to the m8 was for wifi calling that apple won't allow on their devices.